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Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View

1995; University of California Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3519834

1547-3848

Martha S. Feldman,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

This essay proposes a performative model of opera seria founded in ritual to argue that opera seria is better understood as a variety of spectacle than as drama in the modern sense. In this view, opera seria relies for its effectiveness on compositional, dramaturgical, and institutional forms that counteract representational congruities in plots, stage designs, and singers' genders. As both genre and institution, opera seria is rendered unintelligible in models of stageworks upheld by music critics like Tovey and Kerman or anthropologists of theater like Victor Turner. Extending instead the work of anthropologist Stanley Tambiah, the performative model of opera seria presented here sees the ritual mechanics of opera seria as both highly fixed and highly unfixed, ranging from the interactions of singers and audiences to the structuring and delivery of arias and norms of acting. At the base of this ritual process was the archetypal seria story, which delivered an unquestionable set of absolutist propositions that distanced viewers from states of continuous absorption. Attention to the stage was instead relegated mainly to the intersubjective play between viewer and singer in aria ritornello forms. Such interplay and many other seria practices were embedded in the larger rituals of Carnival, masking, and other forms of festivity. By replacing closed with open forms and raising the status of opera seria's authors above that of singers and audiences, efforts at reform attempted to eradicate the ritual and festive dimensions of opera seria.